How to aid (do the testing for) a developer who doesn't own a touchpad to implement Precision bindings?

Question

First of all, I consider myself to be a power user, but wouldn't dare to call myself a software designer.

I opened a feature request to add support for Windows' Precision Touchpad binding in the hotkey section of MPC-BE. They already have a huge hotkey support, including support for assigning actions to click and gestures of all mouse buttons.

The dev's response is that they don't own any device with a touchpad, thus they can't develop for it. Now, I would be very much willing to do all the necessary testing and provide detailed info on what every gesture do and so on.

So here's my question: how I, as someone who doesn't develop, but can reasonably understand code etc, can do all testing steps needed and provide the necessary "calls" the software should make in order to use Precision Touchpads? Are there any manuals or tutorials on developing for these which would help bypass the present issue? May you point me to them?

Edit: I'm also willing to buy them a standalone touchpad, if such a thing exists and it's within my financial grasp. Buyable, budget hardware solutions are also accepted!

By far the best would be to buy/lend the devs the hardware you want them to support. — Philip Kendall, Jul 03 '20 at 14:29
That's also an answer I'm willing to pursue. But does such a device, a standalone touchpad for a PC, exist? — Fabio Freitas, Jul 03 '20 at 14:46

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 04 '20 at 05:09

4

The best course of action is to buy/lend a touchpad for the devs to develop with. Here is an example of one that is from Amazon.com

answered Jul 04 '20 at 05:09

Paul

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The longer a bug lives the more expensive it is to fix. Wouldn’t be surprised if the pads pay for themselves. – candied_orange Jul 04 '20 at 23:49
If a bug lives long enough, it becomes the expected behaviour and can’t be fixed at all. – gnasher729 Jul 05 '20 at 09:56

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 04 '20 at 15:54

Without the hardware, the developer can read documentation, which is often quite ambiguous, try their best to write the correct code, send the result to you, and you test it to find if the behaviour is correct. This is time consuming, and even if testing finds no faults, that might be because two bugs cancel each other, or because functionality was not tested. Error conditions may be very hard to test this way. No debugging is possible.

If you consider the cost of all this, and the risk of producing software with undiscovered bugs, buying the hardware and sending it to the developer is most likely a lot cheaper.

How to aid (do the testing for) a developer who doesn't own a touchpad to implement Precision bindings?

2 Answers2